Letter From the Editor: The Most Transformative Invention Since the iPad

Two decades ago, the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab created a 13-minute video called “The Tablet Newspaper: A Vision for the Future.” In it, a researcher named Roger Fidler describes a series of “transforming inventions” that will reshape the media. The “electronic tablet,” Fidler promises, will be portable (less than 2 pounds!) and feature hi-res videos and interactive graphics. I first saw a clip from this video during a college lecture, and I remember dismissing its pie-eyed naivete. Charming? Sure. But tablets were a sci-fi dream at best, a punch line at worst.

Fidler was on my mind in March 2010 as I drove to Cupertino, California; Apple had invited me to preview the iPad before its launch. A group of us gathered in a windowless room as Apple employees brought in a locked stainless steel case. Someone typed in a code to unlock the case, and another staffer put a sleek aluminum and glass tablet into my hands. I remember everything about that moment—the clarity and responsiveness of the interface, how transformative it felt to manipulate pictures, stories, games, and apps on this big screen. A chimerical technology had suddenly become real.

In the years since, I’ve wondered when or even if I would see such a “transforming invention” again. This spring, the Oculus Rift answered that question. I had been prepared to be skeptical of the much-anticipated virtual reality goggles—WIRED has been proclaiming the revolutionary arrival of VR for two decades, and it had come to seem as laughable as Knight-Ridder’s video. Then I tried the Rift on. It was like the moment when I first held the iPad.

The version of the Rift I tested felt like a pair of heavy ski goggles, and it did seem a little dorky to be fixing and tightening the various headbands and supports. But an amazing transition happened as my eyes resolved a new field of vision. I blinked, and while my brain remembered (for a moment) that I was sitting in my office, my eyes told me I was somewhere completely different. And then, in an instant, my brain joined my eyes, and I was there. It was seamless, and it was crazy.

I went from sitting in a third-floor room in San Francisco to standing on a castle turret in an underground cavern. Looking up, I saw a new ceiling. Looking down and leaning out over the wall, I was—holy shit!—teetering at the rim of a deep canyon with molten lava flowing through it. Some part of my cerebral cortex knew I was perfectly safe, but that lean had my limbic system utterly fooled. I felt a twinge of vertigo; my stomach flipped. I was positive I could fall over the edge. I had to pull back. And then I started laughing.

But there’s nothing comical about the implications of a world where virtual reality is, well, real. The possibilities, as Peter Rubin demonstrates in our cover story, are mind-blowing. Sometimes you can’t believe that sci-fi dreams come true, and then one day, quite suddenly, they are right in front of your face.